The first Sourcing-Innovation sponsored cross-blog series of 2008 starts today – and the topic this time is sustainability. With the recent focus on corporate social responsibility, carbon footprint, the environment, green supply chain, and regulatory compliance, sustainability, in some way, shape, or form is on everybody’s minds – even if they can’t really define what it is. Thus, the doctor thinks it’s the perfect time to address this topic.

the doctor is also hoping that this cross-blog series builds on the success of previous cross-blog series, including:The Future of Sourcing, The Future of Sourcing II, and The Top Threeand becomes the most successful cross-blog series yet. (All of your favorite bloggers, guest-bloggers, and analysts were given one month’s notice, so hopefully they had enough time to prepare! Furthermore, this series runs for two weeks, so even if the doctor missed someone in his invites, or their corporate e-mail server ate the message, they still have time to chime in.)

In addition to giving you great advice on how to be more sustainable, the doctor is hoping that some of the more innovative bloggers will provide us with a better definition of what sustainability really is. If you look at C.J. Abraham’s brief background on sustainability issues, you’ll notice that there’s quite a few definitions out there on what sustainable is, each with a different breadth and depth of focus. Some sound pretty good to the doctor, but others seem to miss the point.

It’s a tough topic. If you look at just the topics covered in the John Lewis Partnership’s Responsible Sourcing Supplier Workbook that was designed to enable sustainable supplier business practices that was covered herein last year (see the JLP category), it alone talked about child labour, forced labour, health & safety, discipline, freedom of association, working hours, equality of treatment, wages, regular employment, and the environment. However, we’ve also talked about carbon foot print, regulatory compliance, waste reduction, SaaS, design for recycling, security, and a host of other topics with respect to sustainability here on this blog.

So be sure to check back regularly as the doctor will be indexing and covering the posts as they hit the blogsphere on a regular basis.